Tag Archives: delete

One of my first ever call outs was from a woman in Stirling who had issues with her internet. When I arrived on site I started troubleshooting the problem. First I checked the cables, then the ethernet adapter swiftly followed by the router but as I dived deeper into her system something was not quite right. A lot of things weren’t working as they should. For example the graphics seamed off while a lot of programs weren’t opening properly. It was at this point she said the immortal words ‘It hasn’t worked right since I started deleting things!!’. Apparently the system had been running slow for a couple of weeks so she thought she would have a bit of a clean out. She had inadvertently started deleting important system files thinking that she didn’t need them!! Needless to say the system had to be reset and it cost her more than it should have.

Don’t for one moment think this only happens in the home market. I had a call out (again in the early days) from a company who were having issues with their server running Small Business Server 2011 Essentials. There was a guy who worked there who thought he was a bit of a wiz kid when it came to computers and had been ‘tweaking’ the settings and cleaning up the system. During one of his ‘clean up’ operations he deleted the antivirus on the system thinking it was out of date and it was getting replaced with a newer piece of software. It wasn’t and it didn’t get replaced Having left the server completely unprotected for two weeks the server contracted a virus which resulted in the whole thing getting reset and restoring from backups. Needless to say the company was not best pleased!!

So the moral of todays story is do not to touch your computer systems unless you are certain you know what you are doing. If you are in any doubt then contact someone who does know and leave them sort it and whatever happens DO NOT DELETE ANYTHING OFF THE SYSTEM UNLESS YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS.